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We don’t just report off-beat news, breaking news and digest the best and worst of the news media analysis and commentary. We give an original take on what happened and why. We add lols, satire, news photos and original content.

For those of you still unconvinced that Islamic State is policed by depraved, murderous nutjobs comes news that jihadis fed a Kurdish fighter to his mother. The Sun leads with the news:

We meet Yasir Abdulla, 36, who has left his home in Yorkshire to fight for a Kurdish homeland. Says he:

“I hate IS because of what happened to an old Kurdish woman from a nearby tribe. Her son was captured by IS fighters and taken as a prisoner to Mosul. She was determined to find her son and went to IS headquarters and asked to see him. The IS men told her to sit down because she had travelled a long way and said she should have some food before they took her to meet her son. They brought her cups of tea and fed her a meal of cooked meat, rice and soup. She thought they were kind. But they had killed him and chopped him up and after she finished the meal and asked to see her son they laughed and said, ‘You’ve just eaten him’.”

And, as ever, we hear the news that the killers do not represent Islam:

“All the tribes are united against IS. They burn people alive, they chop off people’s heads, there is no limit to their depravity. They are not Muslims, they have hijacked Islam. All they do is hate.”

He’s right. It’s tribal. It is Islam. It is nationalistic. It is far more complex than simply being a Muslim problem.

But what of the story of the poor woman who ate her son? It just ends. We want to know what happened to the mother forced into cannibalism. We want to know who did it. We want to know if it is true. Of course, it sounds like it could be.

And what of the kurds, now called “brave” and noble, who are alone defending the West from barbarism, who with the other indigenous peoples of the area (and, yep, let’s include the Jews) are countering the notion that all of the Middle East is exclusively Arab land?

Why didn’t they have their own state, already?

In the early 20th Century, many Kurds began to consider the creation of a homeland – generally referred to as “Kurdistan”. After World War One and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres.

Such hopes were dashed three years later, however, when the Treaty of Lausanne, which set the boundaries of modern Turkey, made no provision for a Kurdish state and left Kurds with minority status in their respective countries. Over the next 80 years, any move by Kurds to set up an independent state was brutally quashed.

Who signed the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the final treaty concluding World War I. Well, Turkey, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia).

The Kurdish minority has frequently suffered oppression, for example in Turkey speaking Kurdish was banned from the 1920s.

A few Iraqi Kurds arrived in Britain after the 1958 coup in Iraq when the nationalist Ba’ath party seized power.

Iranians seeking asylum in London from Shi’ite Muslim Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in 1979 included Kurds.

In 1988, thousands of Kurds were murdered with chemical weapons in the ‘Anfal’ military operations carried out under Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and some escaped to Britain when the Gulf War ended in 1991.

Kurds in Turkey are still not recognised as a separate culture and are discriminated against.

In the late 1980s Alevi Kurds began to come to Britain to escape persecution by Turkish Sunni fundamentalists.

Although Kurds in London may share political sympathies with other expatriates like the Turks, they are nevertheless determined to differentiate their culture from Turkish and other mainstream cultures.

British bureaucracy has often not distinguished Kurds from other refugees from Iran, Iraq and Turkey, so the exact number of Kurds in London is unknown.

Kurdish language station Med-TV has had its licence suspended by the Independent Television Commission. The ITC said several broadcasts by the Kurdish-language company Med-TV had included calls to carry out violent acts in Turkey.

Med-TV has been given three weeks to convince the ITC to allow the station to continue broadcasting.

“The essence of these recent breaches is that the broadcasts contain calls to direct violence and criminal actions of various kinds,” ITC’s Director of Programmes and Cable, Sarah Thane, said.

The broadcasts were made after Turkey’s arrest of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan last month. They featured messages from Kurdish leaders calling for acts of violence in Turkey.

There has been killing and mayhem in the name of Kurdistan in Turkey. But whereas once we condemned it, the West now applauds it. The Kurds have become a useful ally. We love them fighting hard for their ancestral homeland. It’s just that we don’t want them to have the land when the fighting is over. So. Thanks, Yasir, but don’t expect too much from the West…

The Sun has news on Jihadi John. His father, Jasem Emwazi, 51, “has not been seen at his family home in Queen’s Park, North West London, since Mohammed Emwazi was identified as the Islamic State serial killer”. This is because, says the Sun, he’s in Kuwait.

A Kuwaiti “source” tells the paper:

“Security agencies have taken the necessary measures to monitor him and relatives round the clock.”

Why? In case they write Dear John letters? Emwazi’s family are not on trial. Emwazi is. The Guardian adds:

Emwazi’s immediate family are from Kuwait, and his father Jassem, mother Ghaneyah, and eldest brother Omar were on Sunday taken in for routine questioning by Kuwaiti authorities.

Westminster peadophiles: a look at reporting on the allegation that a VIP ring of paedophiles abused children during the 1970s and 1980s.

The most recent national front-page story on Westminster peadophiles appeared on Janaury 27. Then the story was that Sir Leon Brittan, the man accused of burying a dossier on depravity in high places, would be probed “beyond the grave”.

Well, he wasn’t probed in life, so maybe the officers of law and order will have better luck with his corpse.

It turns out that Britton really had been very ill.

But there has been news. It’s just not been as prominent as it once was.

On February 27, Exaro News claimed that Lord John Henniker-Major (ambassador to Jordan) and Sir Peter Hayman (Tory MP) (both dead) led “parallel live”. It says Hayman allowed Peter Righton (dead) to stay at his Suffolk home. Exaro says Righton supplied boys for Hayman and others to abuse at Dolphin Sqaure, the apartment block close to the Houses of Parliament.

Exaro says Righton, as well as being a paedophile, could have been a child killer. Maybe. Maybe not.

The Indy has more (Jan 30):

A top British diplomat and intelligence operative has been named as the focus of a government file into “unnatural” sexual behaviour. The document, which names Sir Peter Hayman as the subject of a briefing compiled for then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher, is now available in the National Archives.

Sir Peter, who died in 1992, was High Commissioner to Canada and was worked for MI6. The file is titled “Sir Peter Hayman: allegations against former public official of unnatural sexual proclivities; security aspects”.

The file bears the codename PREM 19/588, the prefix of which indicates it was prepared for the Prime Minister. Sir Peter Hayman was branded a paedophile in 1983 by Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens, who was speaking in parliament and was therefore protected from legal reprisals under privilege. The file is dated October 1980 – March 1981 – years before the allegations by Mr Dickens were made public.

Henniker was top brass, workjng for the Foreign Office. His obituary in the Guardian begins:

Everything that the 8th Baron Henniker, who has died aged 88, did, as soldier, public servant and diplomat, was done with panache and to applause, until he became director general of the British Council in his 50s.

We learn that he became “director general of the British Council”. Does that link him to Charles Napier, the peadophile who was shunted off to foreign climes? Exaro gives Henniker the side eye but fails to lay the softest glove on him, saying that his links to Hayman “remain unclear”.

Homosexual pardon delayed as officials say it could benefit paedophiles. Liberal Democrats pledge to pardon 49,000 men convicted before 1967 in any future coalition, while campaigners say warning about paedophiles is an excuse.

Eh? This is an old slight on homosexuals, that gay men are all paedophiles or at least shouild be suspected of peadophilia. The criminal conviction of men for homosexuality was an abomination. What consenting adults do with their own bodies without causing harm to unwilling others, pets and precious objects should not be the business of the state.

A campaign to pardon nearly 50,000 men convicted under a 19th-century law for homosexual activity is being delayed amid concerns in Whitehall that a small number of paedophiles could be included.

But this is not about child abuse. This is about adults. We live in an age where the child has become something sacred. Mention that a paedophile could escape justice and all sensible debate about adults is smashed.

Campaigners who had hoped that the royal pardon for the Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing would be extended across the nation have been dismayed by a warning from Whitehall officials that a blanket pardon could benefit gay men who had sex with a minor…

Simon Hughes, the justice minister, will on Saturday pledge that the Liberal Democrats would demand in any future coalition negotiations that a pardon is offered to the estimated 49,000 men convicted of gross indecency before homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967. Hughes will say that the men, of whom 15,000 are believed to be alive, are “morally innocent” of any crime.

But they were not innocent of the crime. They were guilty. The problem was not their morals but their shagging. We are looking at an old law through today’s eyes. We are no more moral than we were back then. Today, just as then, the elite tell us what we should think. The current morally sound view is that homosexuality is ok; that gay marriage ok; that anyone who has a view against either is morally wrong and must be ridiculed and re-educated. We know this because the same groups that outlawed homosexuality now approve it and glow with pride as every gay couple tie the knot. You, the people, are no more free to decide for yourselves now than you were then. You are invited only to conform to the moral message.

If the elite are now so cool with homosexuality, that one man or woman’s body is their own, why isn’t prostitution decriminalised? I’m not talking about child prostitution and unwilling adults being transported by force for sex, which is rape, but a human being’s decision to sell their own body for sex and another’s to rent it? The same society that wants applause and hugs for being pro-gay marriage is so illiberal it wants to control your genitals and desires.

In 2014, the Northern Ireland Assembly voted to make paying for sex illegal. As Dr Brooke Magnanti (aka Belle de Jour) notes, “In the UK, sex work is technically legal – contrary to popular opinion (mainly influenced by cop dramas). Selling sex is not in itself illegal, but pimps, brothels and soliciting all are… With decriminalisation, by contrast, sex workers could work anywhere – even from their homes, or with other prostitutes – without breaking the law. Legalisation gives the employers the balance of power; decriminalisation returns rights to the workers, making them free agents.”

Good idea. But why it’s even being debated is odd in a liberal society. Why does the inclusion of money make sex between two consenting adults turn it into a matter for the State? It’s not as if it’s taxable income, although the punter could write it off as “sundries”.

ANONYMOUS called on their supporters to tonight march on the homes of “elite paedophiles” in the UK who they claim “tortured and murdered children for entertainment”.

Operation Death Eaters has exposed a club that has existed for many years.

“A club of elite paedophiles that have been torturing and murdering children for their own joy and entertainment. These are people in positions of trust and authority, they are raping and torturing children.”

Anonymous told supporters who wanted to join the protest to gather outside Liverpool Street Underground station at 6pm tonight. They claimed that their demonstration would strike the same fear into the “hearts” of the ‘death eaters’ as their alleged victims felt.

Who needs evidence and barriers to guilt proven when you have a morally right group mindset? Just as the gays were no different from the peados; the VIPs gays are now all suspected child abusers.

But at least a lynching would be quick.

As the Mail reported on February 4, “The inquiry into Establishment child abuse could take up to four years to complete, its new chairman has revealed.”

Lowell Goddard, a High Court judge in New Zealand, said leading the probe was the ‘biggest challenge’ she has ever faced as she set out plans to start in April.

Fabienne Roth, Manjot Singh, Negeen Sadeghi-Movahed and Sofia Moreno Haq all raised concerns about confirming Beyda’s appointment to UCLA’s student government judicial board. Roth pointed to an example case from last May and argued that two students who had gone on sponsored trips to Israel should not have been allowed to vote on a resolution that involved targeting Israel with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions measures.

Ah, the BDS movement that seeks to silence Israeli academics, censor individual academic freedom and so delegitimate the state of Israel.

“My issue is, I’m going to be upfront about it, I think she’s pretty great. She’s smart, she like knows her stuff, she’s like probably going to be a really great lawyer. But I’m like not going to pretend this isn’t about conflict of interest. … It’s not her fault … but she’s part of a community that’s very invested in USAC (Undergraduate Students Association Council). … Even if she’s the right person for the job.”

Sadeghi-Movahed added:

“I’m not 100 percent comfortable. I don’t know why. I’ll go through her application again. I’ve been going through it constantly, but I definitely can see that she’s qualified for sure.”

Rachel was asked to leave the room for council discussion. What followed was a disgusting 40 minutes of what can only be described as unequivocal anti-Semitism during which some of our council members resorted to some of the oldest accusations against Jews, including divided loyalties and dishonesty.

Did you know that ‘Jihadi John’ “suffered a head injury when he ran into a goal post as a child”? Mohammed Emwazi was a top chap until he nutted a metal goalpost when he was at his primary school, the St Mary Magdalene Church of England primary school in Maida Vale, West London. So says a former classmate of the wanted man.

And worryingly, in a school yearbook from when he was 10, Emwazi lists his favourite computer game as shooting game “Duke Nukem: Time To Kill” and his favourite book as “How To Kill A Monster” from the popular children’s Goosebumps series.

No. We did not make that up:

Blimey! Best not take any chances, readers. Burn those Goosebumps books, hide the knives and forks and if your local humble, sweet child starts playing Pacman – the game where a nutter chomps amphetamines and eats souls – get him a crate of alcopops, a bag of weed and send him out to play with the other kids.

PS: Goosebumps are written by RL Stine. He’s a Jew. You see, they really are to blame for everything.

You read about #thedress? You might have read about it on Buzzfeed. The site scooped got 27 million pageviews for #TheDress.How did they do it? Well, it’s not that easy. Paul Ford explains that what looks like a simple few posts of mindless chatter a is the result of years of trail, error, stacks of money and fun:

What I saw, as I looked through the voluminous BuzzFeed coverage of the dress, is an organization at the peak of a craft they’ve been honing since 2006. They are masters of the form they pioneered. If you think that’s bullshit, that’s fine — I think most things are bullshit too. But they didn’t just serendipitously figure out that blue dress. They created an organization that could identify that blue dress, document it, and capture the traffic. And the way they got that 25 million impressions, as far as I can tell from years of listening to their people, reading them, writing about them, and not working or writing for them, was something like: Build a happy-enough workplace where people could screw around and experiment with what works and doesn’t, and pay everyone some money.

This is not said as an endorsement of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is utterly deserving of insanely paranoid criticism just like anyone who makes money from your attention, including me. But it’s worth pointing out that their recipe for traffic seems to be: Hire tons of people; let them experiment, figure out how social media works, and repeat endlessly; with lots of snacks. Robots didn’t make this happen. It was a hint of magic, and some science.

So. Why did Mohammed Emwazi become Jihadi John? How does a “humble” schoolboy in a pink jumper became an alleged seriel killer and snuff movie star? This is what we’ve been told so far:

Mental Illness:

Mohammed went to St Mary Magdalene primary school in West London with Emwazi. He tells LBC radio:

“We were in the playground and Mohammed was running away from someone. He was just about to get into a fight and he was running away from someone. As he was running, another kid tried to block off his path. He had nowhere to go and he basically ran into the goalposts, hit his head and fell to the floor.”

After that he “was not the same”.

After secondary school I never had much contact with him. He was one year older than me. But my relationship with him – I told my mum, he was acting a bit weird. And my mum told me “If he’s acting a bit weird, stay away from him.”

Spelling Emwazi was annoying:

Another former classmate says:

“It was a Church of England school and he was the only Muslim in our class. One time we had an RE lesson and he got up and talked about his religion. He wrote Arabic on the board to show us what it looked like and how it went in the other direction. He showed us a religious text and spoke about what his religion was about. That was when we were eight or nine. He mentioned fasting. His English wasn’t very good throughout primary school. He could only say a few words at first – like his name and where he was from.”

E.M.W… Oh, call me John.

Anger Issues:

A teacher who taught Emwazi at Quintin Kynaston school in Queens Park, London, a decade ago tells BBC Two’s Newsnight Emwazi had had therapy for his anger issues:

“We’d find that he’d get very angry and worked up and it would take him a long time to calm himself down, so we did a lot of work as a school to help him with his anger and to control his emotions. It seemed to work. He had a lot of respect for all of the work that had been done for him at our school. He didn’t come from a troubled background. He didn’t leave school with no qualifications. He had every chance of doing well. I just can’t believe he’d do that.”

MI5 hate animals:

Emwazi exhanged meails with Cage, which campaigns against “state policies developed as part of the War on Terror”. Emwazi says he was questioned by a British official at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport after trying to visit Tanzania under the name Muhammad ibn Muazzam. He was going on ‘safari’. He wrote:

“He knew everything about me; where I lived, what I did, the people I hanged around with. He also believed that I was lying [about the holiday in Tanzania] and I wanted to go to Somalia. Then he made a face and said, ‘I am going out of the cell now and by the time I come back, I want you to think about what do you want to say to us’. I said to him that before you go out you have to tell me that what you want from me. He said that he wanted the truth. I said, ‘Bloody hell! I just told you what was our plan and where were we [are] going and you still think that I am lying. What do you want from us?’ He pointed his finger at me and said to me, ‘Don’t try to play smart and lie on my face. Don’t try to fool me. YOU WANTED TO GO TO SOMALIA’.”

Love:

According to Cage, Emwazi blamed UK intelligence services for being prevented from traelling to Kuwait to meet his true love. He wrote:

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started. But know [sic] I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person in-prisoned [sic] and controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace, and my country, Kuwait.”

Mohammed Emwazi wanted to emigrate to Kuwait where his fiancee was waiting but claimed UK intelligence services blocked his visa.

He got lost:

He left the UK. He had changed his name by deed poll to Mohammed al-Ayan. Cage wrote:

“It was four months before the police visited the family home. They explained that they had information that he had entered into Syria. The father said that this could not be true, as far as they were concerned; their son was in Turkey assisting refugees with the limited contact they had managed with him during that period.”

He wasn’t violent:

One of Emwazi’s former teachers said: “He was a diligent hard working lovely young man, responsible, quiet. He was everything you could want a student to be.

“I’m just absolutely shocked that appears to be him. It’s just a 100 miles away from where I thought he’d be. It makes you wonder what can happen in the years when you don’t see these young people. It’s really scary. He was religious and I think as he got older he did become more devout. He would go the mosque and pray, but then a lot of the kids did that.

“He was somebody who would always seek the correct way of handling something. There was never any indication of any violence at all.”

He was violent:

According to the classmate, there was nothing to suggest Emwazi was religious during his teenage years. He was quiet, rarely made eye contact, and always wore a baseball cap – but was known to get into the occasional fight.

Fashion:

Graduating in his early 20s, he is described by those who knew him as a “polite” young man with a “penchant for wearing stylish western clothes” while at the same time “adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith”.

Those black and white ISIS clothes and flags always would attract the fashonable:

He want to be one of the guys:

Asim Qureshi who works for Cage:

“You might be surprised to know that the Mohammed that I knew was extremely kind, extremely gentle, extremely soft spoken, was the most humble young person that I knew. When are we going to finally learn that when we treat people as if they’re outsiders they will inevitably feel like outsiders and they will look for belonging elsewhere.”

In the USA, a man who agreed to buy $20 worth of marijuana for a stranger in exchange for a $5 finder’s fee has been arrested. The $5 was a marked note. The deal was a police sting:

“Six months later, a jury found him guilty of distribution of a schedule I substance (marijuana). Three months after that, a judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with hard labor, without the benefit of parole.”

WE know that The man known as Jihadi John is one Mohammed Emwazi. Lest you be unable to muster your own thoughts on the man who accused of murdering seven foreign hostages, other have spoken.

Asim Qureshi, a director with British advocacy group CAGE,. says said Mohammed Emwazi “became disenfranchised and turned to violence” as a result of a “culture of abuse” by Britain’s security services.”

As Brendan O’Neill replies:

“The idea that harassment or hardship or anger about Western intervention can turn Muslims into beheaders is just racist. Do these people have no self-control? Do they lack autonomy and agency? Are they animals that can be trained / warped by their masters? That’s the implication.”

Speaking of the man, believed to have beheaded at least seven western hostages for the Islamic State, Mr Qureshi said Emwazi “would have never have hurt a single person”.

Mr Qureshi adds:

“You might be surprised to know that the Mohammed that I knew was extremely kind, extremely gentle, extremely soft spoken, was the most humble young person that I knew.”

Bit patronising. And, no, we’re not. Osama bin Laden was an Arsenal fan who holidayed in Sweden with his family. Adolf Hitler always did the dishes with a smile. There is not a single account of the cheeky young Josef Mengele ripping dolls’ heads off.

Quereshi continues:

“We now have evidence that there are several young Britons whose lives were not only ruined by security agencies, but who became disenfranchised and turned to violence because of British counter-terrorism policies coupled with long standing grievances over Western foreign policy. This case should trigger thinking about British domestic and foreign policy. What risk assessments, if any, have been made about British counter-terrorism policy and the key part it plays in radicalising individuals? How have the security services been allowed to get away with abusing British citizens without redress? Why are the long-standing grievances over Western interventions in the Muslim world been ignored?”

Mohammed Emwazi was groomed by the West?

Kay Burley:

“Oh, get over yourself”…

Bethany Haines, daughter of the murdered British aid worker David Haines:

“I think all the families will feel closure and relief once there’s a bullet between his eyes.”

Diane Foley, mother of James Foley, a freelance journalist, said last night that she forgave her son’s killer:

“It saddens me, his [Emwazi’s] continued hatred. He felt wronged, now we hate him — now that just prolongs the hatred. We need to end it. As a mum I forgive him. You know, the whole thing is tragic — an ongoing tragedy.”

Charlie Hebdo now has a print run of 2.5m. The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and other newspapers whose journalists are undervalued and underpaid (surely content providers – ed) may worry that sackings and short contracts will be escalated to more drastic staff-cutting profits-raising measures.

By now the faces are familiar. Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16, all from London, travelled to Istanbul on 17 February to join Islamic State. A source says the teens made it to the Turkey-Islamic State border and “Abu Ali with his men received them on the other side.”

Who he? He is the “Emir of ISIS””

“No one [dares to] speaks to him. He opens or closes the route whenever he wants. And he does whatever he wants to do. The Ali Muntar [local district] borders are in fact not under Turkey’s control – Abu Ali runs the town.”

So, farewell. Kadiza Sultana might be more nuts than fruit as her name suggests, but she’s 16 and old enough to make her own choices. The other two are close enough to walk, talk and board a flight on their own.

These girls want to bring Civilisation to it’s knees. Well, so the West’s leaders keep telling us as the harp on about the ISIS “death cult”. But unless the girls are hit by a bomb dropped from high, high in the skies, if they face any enemy at all it will be the Kurds, on whose shoulders saving the West from barbarism rests. No pressure.

Let your outrage subside and it’s pitifully easy to see what draws these idiots to Islamism. It’s not evil, or any inherent flaw, but just a simple set of ordinary influences which combine to create catastrophe.

For a child to choose religious orthodoxy may seem sinister — aren’t teens supposed to want freedom? — but look again and it’s just the usual rebellion against a parent. These girls and others like them are usually second or third-generation Brits. Their parents have assimilated, hoped their children would follow suit, so they rebel by becoming Islamists. The Dutch academic Ian Buruma spotted the trend a decade ago in a book investigating the assassination (by an Islamist) of the film-maker Theo van Gogh. He said: ‘The main perpetrators of violence in the name of religion in Europe are not, on the whole, the original guest workers or refugees… it is their children born in Europe who are vulnerable to a modern, violent, revolutionary creed.’

The more you tell the kids not to do it, the more they rebel. So:

Ban the veil. ‘Well, screw you, I’ll wear the veil.’

Don’t stay up to late listening to jihadi anti-music. ‘Sod you, dadd-io, I’ll stay up all night shagging a jihadi.’

Watch out for paedophiles. ‘Ha! I’m gonna marry a middle-aged man.’

Hurry home. ‘Ha. I’m off. So long, losers. See you in Hell.’

Most normal 15-year-old girls are popping with righteous indignation, desperately seeking a cause. British schoolgirls of a secular sort find their vocation defending seal pups and abandoned dogs. But for a Muslim schoolgirl, already Islamo-curious, there’s a cause waiting in the wings — and it’s a cause that understands their language.

Isis may seem like bullies to us, but in the skewed light of a smartphone they appear as underdogs, a revolutionary brave brigade taking on the big bad West. Teens don’t sit and watch the news at ten, they pick it up piecemeal on social media. All three of the recent runaways followed countless jihadis online. On Twitter and Instagram, in their own carefully curated feeds, these no-hoper Isis yobs seem not only justified but cool, almost boyband. One Direction — east.

As the three turn their back on enlightenment, feminism, equality, tolerance, freedom, liberty, music and a decent salt beef sandwhich, we saw one of the girl’s fathers. He was holding a teddy on the news. His little girl had left the snuggles and the dolls to watch public executions, shag armed speed-freaks on demand and avoid offending any of the laws of that land lest she be burned alive in a cage.

Then we noticed that the teddy was wearing a Chelsea kit.

Had Chelsea radicalised the teenage girls? Because, you know that all football fans are suspected racists, possibly Nazis? Can we blame Chelsea? Can we blame anyone? The girls have been led astray. They don’t know what they’re doing. They are easily impressionable. Sure, they are turned on by stonings, public beatings, rape, murdering homosexuals and not have to worry if stating a desire to see all Jews killed is misinterpreted as anti-Zionism and some Western liberal’s blather about Israel. Maybe they missed all those videos and news bulletins about the rape, racism and the murder? They heard that you get a free teddy and that Chelsea was the official national team.

…there’s a strong case to be made that fleeing abroad in search of Isis is simply a severe case of teen rebellion. Much, in fact, like the time, aged 15, when I pierced my nose and dyed my hair a sort of toxic cyan shade, imagining myself to look like a sexy mermaid, like Kate from The B52s, but instead resembling the Cookie Monster. I was a complete tit for almost all of the 1980s. The Nineties and Noughties were only marginally better. But still, I am lost for ideas on how we greet young teen rebels who hope to return here after mixing with Isis…

I’d go as far as to say you shouldn’t be allowed back into the country ever, when surely there are dozens of other bloodier, more depressing places that suit your lifestyle choice better. However, I’ve asked my liberal friends what we should do and they all wring their hands and say after some mumbling, “Nothing.” So give me a call when you’re bored with all the stoning, crucifying and beheading. I’ll meet you at Heathrow Arrivals with your teddy.

When you see a dity car do you feel you impelled to draw a penis on it? If you do you might well be British.

Christopher Hooton writes:

Britons most likely to draw a penis on dirty cars, absurd study finds

Show a man a dirty car and we’ll find out whether he’s British or not. Never mind Norman Tebbit’s cricket prober or ctizenship exams, just wheel out a filthy Ford Transit and observe. (If instead of graffitifying it they offer to clean the thing for a fiver, they’re most likely foreign.)

Cliff Richard – still Sir Cliff Richard – is on the front page of all the tabloids.

The Mirror (front page): “Cliff Richard Facing New Sex Claims”

Not too long ago that shocker would have been that Sir Cliff had ever had sex, preferring tennis and al fresco singing to nookie. Now we read that “police are probing new claims of sex abuse with Sir Cliff Richard are more alleged victims came forward”. An “officer”, revealed to be South Yorkshire Police Chief Constable David Crompton, says”This investigation has increased significantly.”

Crompton made his comment in a letter to Home Affiars Committee chariman Keith Vaz.

Page 9: “I have no idea where these absurd & untrue allegations come from,” says Cliff. The Mirror fails to tell its readers that Cliff said that on his Facebook page:

I have no idea where these absurd and untrue allegations come from. The police have not disclosed details to me. I have never, in my life, assaulted anyone and I remain confident that the truth will prevail. I have cooperated fully with the police, and will, of course, continue to do so.

Beyond stating that the allegations are completely false, it would not be appropriate for me to say anything further until the investigation has concluded, which I hope will be very soon. In the meantime, I would, again, like to thank everyone for supporting me through this unbelievably difficult period.

“Police were called at approximately 13:50hrs on Sunday, 22 February to Central Circus, NW4 following reports of a man allegedly making anti-Semitic comments. Officers attended and a 44-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence. He was taken to a north London police station and subsequently bailed pending further enquiries.”

We only know of this because the Shomrim (“guards” in Herbrew) tweeted it:

There are four Shomrim groups in the UK, one operating in around London’s Golders Green, another in the capital’s Stamford Hill and two in Manchester.

“People in this part of London call us before the police in an emergency,” Shulem says of their hotline number, which receives between 11 to 15 calls a day. “People know they get an instant response from Shomrim, and in most cases we’ll be there way before the police because we’re so local – usually in around 40 seconds, whereas the police have their fastest response target at around 15 minutes…

The patrols are supported by Hatzola, an ambulance service run by Jewish volunteers with emergency medical technician training. “Our ambulance service is much faster as well,” claims Shulem. “They get to the scene of an incident in three minutes. The London Ambulance target is eight minutes….

“It’s no secret that the police are stretched and officers are tied up with paperwork instead of being able to patrol the streets,” says Shulem. “Even before the cuts, Shomrim has been a simple addition to the police. We have been brought up locally, live locally, work locally and drive up and down these streets every day. We know the regular faces – the goodies and the baddies.”

In 2010, the Independent began it’s story on the all-male volunteer Shomrim with the headline:

Justice on London’s streets, the Jewish way

Are the police in favour?

When the group was established in 2008, Supt Steve Dann, the then Hackney commander, said: “I am very upset that no-one has approached me about this. It has been done behind my back. I see this as a slight against me that we were not delivering a service.”

He might take offence at the new Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act (more on that later). But is the emergence of the Shomrim a reflected that the Jewish community doesn’t believe they’re going to be protected by the police?

The Metropolitan Police is not keen on the suggestion that their services require supplementation. Senior officers have voiced concern over the group’s existence, insisting that trained police officers and no one else should attempt to deal with crimes in progress.

Hackney’s borough commander, Chief Superintendent Steve Bending, said: “Whilst I have a great amount of respect for the Orthodox Jewish Community within Hackney, I do not support the concept of any community having its own form of patrol service. There is a risk of other communities feeling intimidated by this course of action.

“There is also an issue of members putting themselves at physical risk through attending an escalating situation, interfering with possible evidence or potentially risking criminal prosecution themselves, should their conduct in dealing with members of the public justify that course of action.”

But this isn’t the self-styled Muslim Patrol who wandered parts of East London enforcing their own laws:

Three members of a self-styled “Muslim Patrol” vigilante group have been jailed for harassing, intimidating and assaulting people on the streets of east London while claiming they were enforcing sharia law.

A judge at the Old Bailey had heard that Jordan Horner, 19, Ricardo MacFarlane, 26, and a 23-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons, had terrorised a couple for walking through Bethnal Green holding hands, told a woman in Stepney that she would be punished in “hellfire” because of the way she was dressed, and attacked a group of men who were drinking in Shoreditch.

The Shomrim will not jump you for eating a pork bap in public.

Nor will they offer you booze, as the ‘Christian Patrol’ has:

A group with links to the British National Party is holding “Christian Patrols” in the East End to defend what it calls British soil against Muslim extremists…

Nationalist group Britain First drove into Brick Lane in two armoured Gulf War Land Rovers on Friday with leaflets warning of “Muslim Patrols” in the area.

The group drew the opprobrium of the Bishop of Stepney, who said there was “no place” for them in Tower Hamlets.

Britain First’s chairman, Paul Golding, formerly a senior figure in the BNP, said he hoped to “draw out” Muslim extremists using cigarettes and beer as “bait”.

Michael Levy, the Conservative Party councillor for the Springfield ward, adds:

“The police are understandably nervous because it is a new organisation but they will soon pick it up and realise that the group is a benefit and can help to drive down crime. It is a valuable service and will be able to augment the police service.

“The police encourage neighbourhoods to have a neighbourhood watch service and I cannot see a great deal of difference between that and this, apart from the fact that this is active rather than static. But that is a good thing because it will inevitably provide a great deal of intelligence for the police service.”

Orthodox organisation, which works closely with the Metropolitan Police, tweeted from their @shomrimlondon account: ‘Following events in Paris we will have on extra patrols throughout NW London over Shabbos [ the Jewish sabbath].’

But the Shomrim do more than just help old ladies cross the street. Bernath can’t resist invoking the time in 2007 that the Borough Park Shomrim helped nab a gang of burglars who posed as water inspectors to get into the apartments of the elderly and trusting. The thieves had been on a tear through Brooklyn.

“The police, due to our great relationship, told us about this,” Bernath says. “We found out about it on a Wednesday. On the Friday, we get a call over our hotline: ‘We think these are the guys.'”

Making use of their unmarked cars, the Shomrim followed the van in question throughout the neighborhood for five or six hours, but it never made any suspicious moves. Finally, Bernath says, five men got out and entered a building. The Shomrim called the precinct commander, and when the men left the building with several apartments’ worth of loot, the cops nabbed them.

“We had a great arrest,” Bernath says. “If not for the Shomrim, it would never have happened.”

The Shomrim are also prepared to put themselves in harm’s way before police arrive.

Last fall, as children filled the streets of Borough Park for a religious celebration, the Shomrim got word that David Flores, suspected of masturbating in front of children in the neighborhood earlier in the day, was still cruising the area in his car. When the Shomrim found him trapped in traffic, Flores fled on foot, carrying a gun. They tackled him, and in the resulting scuffle, four Shomrim members were shot, though none fatally.

Exciting stuff. But that about bias and not always working with the Government?

The most heat the Shomrim took in the aftermath of the Kletzky murder wasn’t for failing to find the boy or for waiting too long to call the cops. It came with the revelation that the Shomrim actually maintain a list of suspected child molesters in the neighborhood that they will not share with police.

“The community doesn’t go to the police with these names because the rabbis don’t let you. It’s not right,” Shomrim coordinator Jacob Daskel told the Daily News shortly after Kletzky’s body was found.

The statement resonated because it placed the Shomrim at the heart of an issue that has been bubbling in the Haredi community for the better part of a decade: a sex- abuse epidemic akin to the far more publi- cized scandal rocking the Catholic Church.

“The Shomrim have helped the police maintain a community that’s mostly free of the shootings in the streets and crimes that usually end up in the media,” says Ben Hirsch, a founder of the advocacy group Survivors for Justice. “But you do still have some of the terrible social crimes that police would normally be responding to. Instead, within these communities, these crimes are usually reported to Shomrim, and the Shomrim coordinators working together with Orthodox Jewish “community liaisons” cover it up, and it never gets to the cops.”

A person can be ordered to leave an area for up to 48 hours if judged to be ‘committing or likely to commit anti-social behaviour’;
Issued by police officers or Police Community Support Officers;
No requirement that the area be designated a dispersal zone in advance;
Officer can specify the route for person to leave and can confiscate any item ‘that could be used to commit anti-social behaviour’;
Violation is a criminal offence, up to level 4 fine and 3 months in prison.

Civil injunctions (replace ASBOs)

Injunction can be issued if person ‘has engaged or threatens to engage in anti-social behaviour’;
Issued in Magistrate’s Court, on application by state agency (eg, council, police, NHS Protect, Environment Agency);
Injunction can require the individual to do specified things, or not to do specified things, for the purpose of preventing the individual ‘from engaging in anti-social behaviour’;
Anti-social behaviour is defined as behaviour causing ‘harassment, alarm and distress’ (outside of social housing); or in social housing, as behaviour causing ‘nuisance and annoyance’;
Case proven on balance of probabilities;
Violation is civil offence, prosecuted as contempt of court which carries an unlimited fine and maximum two years’ prison sentence.

Community Protection Notice (CPN)

CPN can be issued if the conduct of an individual or body is judged to have a ‘detrimental effect’ on the ‘quality of life of those in the locality’;
CPN can require people to stop doing specified things or to do specified things;
Can be issued by council and police officers;
Officers can seize items ‘used in the commission of the offence of failing to comply with a CPN’, such as ‘sound-making equipment’;
Issuing of notice must be proceeded by warning, either written or a ‘pre-agreed form of words’ that can be used by the officer on the spot;
Violation is a criminal offence;
Punished by £100 on-the-spot fine, or by prosecution.

Bath City Council joins Birmingham in threatening to use Public Spaces Protection Orders to prohibit busking. Canterbury City Council also threatens a crack-down on busking, including confiscating buskers’ instruments.

“These powers are too wide-ranging. The definition for what is antisocial is far too broad and I would worry about these orders being misused. It could lead to council staff feeling they can police what they feel is ‘appropriate’ behaviour. But it is important to remember the police already have powers to deal with criminal behaviour. I would also worry that this could see homeless people removed from the city centre. The council should rein in these powers and agree to only use them after a public consultation.”

North East Lincolnshire Council’s antisocial behaviour co-ordinator discussed the new powers to evict tenants and close premises. He said: ‘Some of these measures are quite draconian and could have a significant effect on the council. Quite where the money comes from is a massive issue. In certain areas you could probably evict half a street.’

It’s no secret that one of the largest blocs of people pressing for so-called “gun control” is the culturally (aka not-so-religious) American Jewish community. This confounds many observers who would expect that Jews, with such a stunning history of oppression and murder by humanity’s villains, would cling tenaciously to personal firearms and the ability to protect themselves as the Hebrew Scriptures instruct.

In reaction to the Holocaust, American Jews adopted the phrase “Never Again!” If actions mean anything, they don’t believe it. That’s for someone else to do. How do Jews expect to put teeth behind the words “Never Again!” if not with the ability to apply and project personal force when righteous — and necessary — for survival?

Swedish Jewry is under attack. Danish Jewry is under attack. But there is hope that racists will not win in Scandinavia. The media has been reporting on Muslims coming to the sid of Jews under threat. Because a large chunk of antisemtism is perpetrated by Muslims against Jews, this is a good thing. Last week a Jewish guard at a Copenhagen synagogue was murdered by an Islamist.

So. Norway’s Muslims joined hands in a show of force. They stood around the Olso synagogue and took a stand.

The Guardian saw a big crowd of 1,300 people:

The report tells readers that 1,300 people were there to support the Jews and show them that Muslims care:

As the mainly elderly Jewish congregation filed out of the synagogue after Shabbat prayers, a group of young Muslims, many of them teenage girls wearing headscarves, formed a symbolic ring outside the building to applause from a crowd of more than 1,000 people.

“This shows that there are many more peacemakers than warmakers,” 37-year-old Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the organisers, told the crowd.

“There is still hope for humanity, for peace and love across religious differences and background,” he added, before a traditional Shabbat ceremony was held in the open air with many demonstrators adding their voices to the Hebrew chants.

Norway’s chief rabbi, Michael Melchior, appeared visibly moved when he said it was the first time the ceremony had taken place outdoors with so many people.

Ervin Kohn, a Jewish community leader, said: “It is unique that Muslims stand to this degree against antisemitism and that fills us with hope … particularly as it’s a grassroots movement of young Muslims,” adding that the rest of the world should “look to Norway”.

So. Do you focus on the hope, the many and the grandstanding, which it undoubtedly is. Or do you look for a problem?

Things kicked off when Peter Oborne resigned his post as the paper’s chief political commentator. He was upset with what he saw as the editorial being shaped by the advertisers, particularly the paper’s attitude to the HSBC scandal.

In a long and thorough piece on OpenDemocracy, Oborne accused the paper of enacting “a form of fraud on its readers”.

“It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers. There is only one word to describe this situation: terrible.”

He also attcked the paper’s committment to listicles and other attempts to copy Buzzfeed, the Daily Express and other click-baiting sites, noting:

“The more important measure appeared to be the number of online visits.”

Madeleine McCann: a look at reporting on the missing child in the news.

The Times reports on the inquest into the death of Brenda Leyland, 63, the woman accused of being obsessed with the McCanns, posting thousands of tweets about the missing child’s parents. In one, she called them the “worst of humankind”. Other tweets might be libellous.

You might not have noticed Leyland had it not been for Sky News’ decision to doorstep her on the telly. Sky said Leyland had “trolled” the parents of Madeleine McCann. But what did Sky do? Was it any better? Worse?

While @sleepface (Leyland’s twitter handle) tweeted to a handful of of followers, Sky brodcast to the masses.

And if we get to see her squirm, why do we not also get to see the journalists and editors who libelled the McCanns and Robert Murat on the rack?

How many of the people who absued the McCanns and Murat in the mainstream media can you name? Were any of them doorstepped?

And it makes us wonder if Brenda Leyland a useful fool, a soft target to make the media look tough on so-called trolls people who says nasty things?

Brenda Leyland was monstered on twitter and billed as a “twisted, fecked up bitch” by a Mirror columnist. We yet to read a description so strong for any woman joining ISIS. Leyland really was that bad.

And who tipped Sky News off? Who told the police about this woman with her fixation?

The coroner wants to know.

A coroner has demanded that a Sky News reporter divulge his source for a story about a woman who was found dead after the broadcaster revealed that she had “trolled” the parents of Madeleine McCann.

The demand has raised fresh concerns about the state encroaching on journalists’ rights to keep their sources confidential, in the wake of revelations that police forces looked into their phone records on hundreds of occasions.

Martin Brunt, who doorstepped Leyland should, of course, not reveal who tipped him off.

Mrs Leyland, of Burton Overy, Leicestershire, had been confronted days earlier as part of Mr Brunt’s exposé of a vitriolic online campaign against Kate and Gerry McCann. Their daughter, Madeleine, was three years old when she vanished from their holiday apartment in Portugal in 2007…

Leicestershire police wrote to Sky on behalf of the coroner, Catherine Mason, asking a series of questions including the identity of the person who was behind the dossier of tweets. Sky has said that it will protect its source, arguing that its rights are protected under European law. It is understood that neither the police nor the coroner have responded since.

Mr Brunt and Jonathan Levy, director of news gathering and operations at Sky News, are expected to be called to give evidence as witnesses on March 20.

They will, of course, not reveal their sources. They must not. The problem is that just as the barriers between public and private discourse have changed, so too has the law.

The demand comes after the government promised to change legislation so that police must gain a judge’s agreement before they can snoop on journalists. It took action after it emerged that phone or email data was accessed to uncover confidential sources on 600 occasions.

Police admitted using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to obtain email and phone communications between 82 journalists and 242 sources across 34 investigations in the past three years.

RIPA is the law of the totalitarian police state. RIPA is the law that makes all of us suspects. If you hated hacking, you should hate RIPA.

Some 82 journalists have had their communications data obtained by police under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act in three years, the Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office has found.

Rotherham: a look at the story of abuse, prejudice and dereliction of duty in Yorkshire.

What we know is that happened in the past. But what we really want to know is what’s happening now? But the conversation is obsessed with matters of historic sex abuse in Rotherham and elsewhere by gangs of men of mainly Pakistani origin is not allowing us to see the now.

The temptation is to believe that with this abuse high on the news cycle, the assaults on vulnerable and underage girls by gangs of sexual deviants is over. Scared of exposure and prison, the criminals have stopped.

A Turkish man showing Adolf Hitler, with a statement praising the death of Jews, are a legitimate expression of criticizing the Jewish state, the spokesman for the prosecutor office in the city of Linz, Philip Christl, said on Tuesday.

“I could have annihilated all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them alive so you will know why I was killing them…,” Ibrahim B. wrote on his Facebook page in December.

Ibrahim, the 29-year-old owner of a hair salon in the city of Wels near Linz, attributed the quote to Hitler and posted a picture of the German dictator on his Facebook site. Ibrahim launched his pro-Nazi tirade in the context of criticizing Israel’s Operation Protective Edge war against Hamas last summer.

Ibrahim also asked God (who’s not on Facebook) if he would destory Israel and, presumably, murder all the Jews who live there.

It looks a lot like Ibrahim had broken the Austrian law against glorifying Nazis. But the State rueld that the “statements as merely expressing ‘displeasure toward Israel”.